Part of being a developer is taking requirements that are written by business analysts and understanding the business problem and the requirements enough to develop a working software solution to solve the problem. In most environments, BAs will work with the developers to help them understand the feature. Once the developers are done, the QA team has to try to understand all of the requirements that the BAs and developers already covered extensively.

You can run into multiple problems here. First, many business analysts write requirements in a format that are not detailed enough to outline all of the edge cases. This is not a knock on business analysts, but they often think in terms of use cases and how the business will use the functionality. But this is why we have a team. Business analysts are better at thinking about the needs of the business and how the app will solve business problems. Developers and testers are good at thinking about the details but sometimes don’t always see the big picture.

This is why it’s so important to bring all of the team members together so that we can take advantage of all of our strengths. We do this in a meeting we call the “three amigos”.

How It Works

A three amigos meeting consists of a business analyst, a QA tester, and a developer. If it’s a larger feature that might involve more than one developer or more than one tester, then you might have more people in the meeting. The BA has written up all of the requirements beforehand, and ideally everyone in the meeting will have read through them before the meeting so that people can have a basic understanding of the feature and can come with their questions.

Once we all have a basic understanding of what we need to develop, we read through the requirements together and someone starts writing all of the test scenarios on a whiteboard. We’re not writing out the complete test plans, we’re just covering the scenarios that need to be tested and maybe some of the things that each scenario will check for. The primary goal is here to figure out what needs to be tested and how we’re going to test each scenario (unit tests, acceptance tests, or manual tests).

Outcomes

The primary outcome of the three amigos are acceptance tests written in Given/When/Then format. Actually writing these out can take a little time, so we don’t do that with everyone sitting in a room. Typically a developer or a tester will work on it outside of the meeting, and once they have the scenarios all written out, then we do a quick review with everyone else that was involved in the original three amigos meeting to make sure that we all agree with what was produced.

Benefits

When you get everyone involved up front, you spread the understanding of what’s being developed across multiple team members. On most teams, BAs and developers have a good understanding of what’s being built, but QA people are left in the dark until you’re most of the way through the process. This way, QA people know what’s going on and they can add their valuable input before a line of code is written. As a developer, this will also help you because the QA people helped you agree on the acceptance criteria that you’ll need in order to complete the feature. No more guessing about what QA is going to test or whether you’ve built everything that needs to be built.

Automating acceptance tests becomes much easier when QA people have helped you come up with the tests and have agreed on them. This is also a good chance to talk to the QA team about what you’re going to automate so that they know that they don’t have to spend as much time manually testing scenarios that the developers have fully automated. Remember, we’re all on the same team, and we’re all responsible for quality. It shouldn’t matter who is testing something as long as it gets tested.

In the end, you end up with fewer bugs because developers know what they need to build and they have everything they need to build it with no coding errors. Certainly this works much better if you’re writing automated unit tests and acceptance tests, but even if you aren’t, at least you will know what you need to build and what it needs to be able to do in order to pass all of the QA tests.

Exceptions

As with everything in software development, it helps to use common sense. We typically don’t do three amigos meetings for really simple features. There’s no hard and fast rule about this, so you have to use your head. If it doesn’t make sense to have a meeting with a bunch of people to review something that you can handle with simple hallway conversations, then go with that.

We don’t always do three amigos on bugs either. If it’s a coding error, there isn’t much to discuss, it just doesn’t work correctly. If we missed something in the requirements, it might require a bigger discussion about the new requirement.

I think that it’s dangerous to make blanket policies that say that you must have a meeting or a certain amount of documentation before you start development on something. The goal is to develop working software that meets the needs of the business with a sufficient level of testing and documentation. You have to decide what that is and how you get there.

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